Tag Archives: Cristina Leston-Bandeira

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Parliamentary select committees at Westminster are assisted in their work by teams of impartial parliamentary staff who fulfil a variety of functions. This can include the provision of legal advice by parliamentary lawyers. In recent years, some committees have chosen to publish that legal advice. Drawing on their ongoing research, Ben Yong, Greg Davies and Cristina Leston-Bandeira examine the practice of publishing legal advice, the reasons behind it and the potential implications for the work of committees and their advisers.

In 2017, the House of Lords European Union Subcommittee on Financial Affairs took a highly unusual step. It published the advice provided by the then EU Committee legal adviser, Paul Hardy, as part of its inquiry on Brexit and the EU Budget. Hardy argued Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union allowed the UK ‘to leave the EU without being liable for outstanding financial obligations under the EU budget’ (p.63). The implications of such advice were politically controversial.

But the act of publishing in its entirety the in-house legal advice provided to the committee, and the legal adviser named, also merits serious attention. There is a small but growing trend of select committees at Westminster publishing the legal advice provided to them by the in-house lawyers of parliament (‘parliamentary lawyers’).The trend raises a number of questions: why are Westminster select committees publishing in-house legal advice; what does this tell us about the internal dynamics of select committees; and what are the implications of publishing internal advice for the House and parliament? This is the focus of our latest article, ‘Tacticians, Stewards and Professionals: The Politics of Publishing Select Committee Legal Advice’(open access from the Journal of Law and Society).

We have been carrying out a bigger project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, looking at the provision and reception of legal advice to the four legislatures of the UK. We have now interviewed about 75 individuals, of whom approximately 30 work or worked in Westminster.

Why is this happening?

Select committees will sometimes receive legal advice from the in-house legal services of parliament. In the House of Commons, for instance, much of this comes from the Office of Speaker’s Counsel: a small group of lawyers who are permanent, impartial House staff, employed to provide legal support and advice to the Houses of Parliament. ‘Legal advice’ can cover explanation and information to the application of relevant law to a specific set of facts, and any of the various stages in between. We focus on the more formal side of the spectrum.Continue reading →

Over 40,000 e-petitions have been submitted to parliament since the current system was introduced in 2015. Cristina Leston Bandeira and Viktoria Spaiser have conducted research into how the public views the consequent parliamentary discussion of issues raised in these petitions by analysing comments made by those watching the live parliamentary coverage. Their findings lead them to conclude that parliamentary debates should be adapted to be more inclusive of the original petitions’ aims.

Parliament introduced an e-petitions system in 2015 with the aim of enhancing its relationship with the public. The system has seen extraordinary levels of usage, with over 40,000 e-petitions submitted and plenty of other evidence of very considerable engagement from the public, such as petitions debates regularly being the most read debates on Hansard. The extraordinary usage is only one element of this new system, however. At the Centre for Democratic Engagement, we have been investigating it, focusing in particular on the more subtle expressions of engagement, beyond usage numbers. We have interviewed petitioners, developed participant observation, and analysed petitions data, parliamentary documentation and social media activity associated with e-petitions.

Some of this research has now started to come out, namely our latest article in Policy & Internet, where we use natural language processing, machine learning and social network analysis of Twitter data to explore what it shows about the extent of people’s engagement, the contents of Twitter e-petition conversations, who is taking part and how they interact. In this blog post we focus on how the public react to the format of the e-petitions parliamentary debates, through their comments on Twitter whilst they watch these debates. Our findings provide interesting insights into how people perceive the e-petition procedures in terms of fairness and responsiveness, suggesting that petition parliamentary debates could be more inclusive of the original petitions’ aims. Continue reading →

In February this year, Oxford University Press published Exploring Parliament, which aims to provide an accessible introduction to the workings of the UK parliament. In this post, the book’s editors, Louise Thompson and Cristina Leston-Bandeira, explain why the book is necessary and what it hopes to achieve.

If you travelled to Parliament Square today you’d see hundreds of tourists gathered in and around the Palace of Westminster. Over 1 million people visited parliament in 2017 to take part in organised tours, watch debates in the Lords and Commons chambers, attend committee hearings and visit its unique gift shops. Many more will have watched parliamentary proceedings on television; most likely snapshots of Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs). Recognition of the iconic building, with its gothic architecture, distinctive furnishings and vast corridors is high. However, the public’s understanding of what actually goes on within the Palace of Westminster is much lower.

As we write this blog it is another typically busy day in parliament. Among the many other things happening in the Commons today, Labour MP Diana Johnson is asking an Urgent Question on the contaminated blood scandal, there is a backbench debate on autism and an adjournment debate on air quality. Over in the Lords, peers will be scrutinising the Modern Slavery (Victim Support) Bill and debating the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Those of us who teach, research or work in parliament will know what each of these activities is. We’ll know why the Commons chamber will be far quieter during adjournment debates than at question times and we’ll be able to follow with relative ease the discussion in the Lords as peers scrutinise the various clauses, schedules, and amendments being made to government legislation. But to the wider public the institution can seem somewhat opaque. The language may seem impenetrable, the procedures archaic and the customs of debate unfamiliar. One may say there is therefore an important role, and perhaps duty, for those of us who teach and research parliament to inform and educate the wider public about the diverse range of roles being performed each day by the institution and its members.Continue reading →

In a new article David Judge and Cristina Leston-Bandeira identify non-elected officials rather than elected members as those who ‘speak for’ and ‘act for’ parliaments as institutions most often. In this post they discuss this paradox and some of their key findings in relation to the UK parliament.

‘Unless someone stood up for parliament as an entity we might lose it. It wouldn’t be seen as precious’. (senior parliamentary official).

Are parliamentarians necessarily the best people to represent parliaments as institutions? To take the Westminster parliament as one example some of its members, such as Lord Norton, undoubtedly want MPs to ‘promote vigorously the institution of which they are members’. Others, however, such as Mhairi Black are only too eager to claim, repeatedly, that Westminster is ‘a totally defunct institution’. Still others, like Nick Clegg or Andy Burnham, before leaving the Commons in 2017, have willingly invoked the term ‘the Westminster bubble’ to denote a pathological institutional remoteness and disconnect from the public.

The fundamental question is: why would we expect parliamentarians to represent the institution of parliament, and what would they be representing anyway? Certainly, democratic linkage – of how parliaments engage with and inform citizens – has been of increasing concern for academics and parliaments alike. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to what is being communicated to citizens about parliaments and upon the nature of the parliamentary institutions that citizens are expected to engage with. This is the neglected institutional dimension of parliamentary representation: the representation of what parliaments ‘are’, what claims are made on their behalf and who the makers of these claims are. This second dimension is the focus of our recent article in Political Studies and we outline here some of the basic argument and key findings in relation to the UK parliament at Westminster. Our wider study examines claim-based notions of representation using interview data from 39 key actors in the Scottish, Westminster and European parliaments.

In terms of who is doing the representing, it is relatively easy to identify why MPs might not be the primary actors in representing the institution of parliament. Paradoxically, elected representatives, who are the prime makers of electoral representative claims, are at best tangential makers of institutional representative claims. In essence, MPs operating within the frame of electoral politics make a first-dimensional ‘person-to-person’ set of claims. In this dimension, the elected representative makes a claim to represent – to act for, speak for, or stand for – the represented, whether as individual voters or groups of individuals (most notably as members of geographical constituencies, political parties, or nations and/or states). And, equally the same representatives may also serve, as part of a two-way process, to represent the constructed claims – especially of parliamentary party, government or even the state itself – back to the represented. In this process elected representatives may be identified as the makers of claims about their parties or about governments (supportive or otherwise) or about the nation and/or state, but only tangentially about parliament as an institution. Whereas the other collective forms have some existence beyond parliament, parliament itself does not have an institutional representational existence other than as the sum of disparate, often contradictory, other ‘first-dimension’ forms of representation.

In this sense, the Westminster parliament takes on a ‘hollowed-out’ representative institutional form: it is populated by MPs – active person-to-person representative claim-makers – who do not primarily stand for, or necessarily make positive claims on behalf of, the institution itself. Yet, in times of decreased levels of citizen trust in parliamentary representatives, widespread public dissatisfaction with the competence of parliaments, and when the role of established parliamentary institutions has become subject to reappraisal and hence to contestation, then the requirement for institutional representation, for claims to be made about and on behalf of parliaments themselves, has become ever more pressing. In these circumstances, as one of us has pointed out, public engagement strategies have come to be elevated in the corporate priorities of the UK parliament. These are not simply educational or informational strategies. They are, more significantly, institutional representational strategies.

The House of Commons and government collaborative e-petitions site re-opened on 11 September, following an extended break during the general election and the early months of the new parliament. In this post Cristina Leston-Bandeira reflects on the experience of the e-petitions system during the 2015–17 parliament, the first following its establishment. She identifies four types of role performed by petitions to parliaments and provides evidence that the UK system has performed important roles in all of these areas.

Closed since early May, the House of Commons and government collaborative e-petitions site re-opened on 11 September, as its committee was finally re-established. By the end of its first day, 11 petitions had been added to the site, collecting over 11,000 signatures. As the Petitions Committee re-starts its work, it is worth reflecting on its experience during its first parliament and its potential role.

The system was launched in 2015 and saw extraordinary volumes of usage in the 2015-17 parliament, with 31,731 e-petitions submitted in less than two years and 14 million unique e-mail addresses used to sign petitions. This corresponds to an average of 1,480 e-petitions submitted per month, which is considerably higher than equivalent petitions system in other legislatures; for instance, the monthly average number of petitions submitted in 2015 to the German Bundestag was 1,186 (despite Germany having a larger population).

There is no doubt that the new e-petitions system has caught people’s imagination and has been heavily used since it was introduced. But has it achieved much, other than a lot of activity and noise? Out of those submitted, 10,950 were accepted and 471 got a government response, having reached the required threshold of 10,000 signatures. Besides this, 39 parliamentary debates were held on e-petitions that reached 100,000 signatures (with some debates encompassing more than one petition). Assessing the contribution of petitions is not always straightforward though, for a variety of reasons explored in a previous blog post such as the difficulty in identifying causal relationships between petitions and outputs. In order to evaluate a petitions system, it is more helpful to think in terms of the roles it performs.

The UK parliament’s collaborative e-petitions site celebrates its first birthday today. Over the last year over 18,000 petitions have been submitted, a level not seen since the 19th century. In this post Cristina Leston-Bandeira discusses how this has been achieved, pointing to the success of the new Petitions Committee and in particular the way that it has engaged with other parliamentary activities. The next challenge may be to consider how to maximise the number of petitions that can realistically lead to some sort of outcome.

The UK parliament’s new collaborative e-petitions site went live one year ago. Nine petitions were submitted and 60,580 signatures were added on that single first day, 20 July 2015. Twelve months on, a total of 18,767* petitions have been submitted and millions of people have signed at least one petition. This is a stark contrast with the story of decline the UK parliament’s petitions system had known since the 19 century. From a highly used tool in past centuries, namely from the 17th century to the beginning of 19th, a time when thousands of petitions were presented annually with the back-up of millions of signatures, the number of petitions submitted fell to about 35 yearly in 1970s, rising slightly in the 1980s and 1990s, but never to their previous glory. Move forward to the 21st century, and, in one year, we are back to early 19th century levels of support for petitions – not a mean feat. But are petitions achieving anything?

The key to answer this question lies in the new Petitions Committee, in place since June last year. Equipped with a small support team but oozing with enthusiasm and ideas, the committee has achieved much over the past year. The system established that petitions with a threshold of 100,000 signatures should be considered for a debate and those with 10,000 signatures should receive a response from government. The Petitions Committee has hosted 20 debates in Westminster Hall on petitions with over 100,000 signatures, and the government has responded to 257 petitions (with only 17 still waiting for a government response at the time of writing). In short, a very small proportion of the petitions submitted have led to a specific action. But this is a very simplistic summary of the work developed by the committee to support the dissemination and effectiveness of petitions, where three key elements have made a clear difference: cross-fertilisation with other ongoing parliamentary work, openness in working methods and a strong focus on public engagement.

The 2015 parliament has seen the establishment of a new Petitions Committee and e-petitions system. Cristina Leston-Bandeira discusses the committee’s initial activity, arguing that it has achieved much in the space of six months and has the potential to pave the way towards a new kind of public engagement with parliament.

One of the novelties of the 2015 parliament has been the establishment of a Petitions Committee, which has the potential to pave the way for a new style of public engagement for parliament.

Following the approval of a motion to create a new Petitions Committee last February, and still with no elected chair, the new Petitions Committee’s team set out to establish the foundations of what would become the UK government and parliament collaborative e-petitions system, integrating also the traditional paper public petitions presented through MPs. On 18 June the committee’s chair, Helen Jones, was elected and a month later, on 20 July, the new collaborative e-petitions site went live. At the same time the old Downing Street e-petitions site closed down. Nine e-petitions were submitted on that first day, collecting between them 60,580 signatures on that single day. Less than two months later the committee led its first debate on a petition that had achieved over 100,000 signatures, on contracts and conditions in the NHS.

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The Constitution Unit in the Department of Political Science at University College London is the UK’s leading research body on constitutional change.

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